Dibujos mentales. Principios del universo creativo de Juan Navarro Baldeweg - Ignacio Moreno

Over the years I have been developing a body of work, as an architect and also as a creator of pieces and paintings, in which recurring motifs can be detected, themes that arise from the desire to bear witness, through it, to essential dimensions that are ingredients of the physical environment that surrounds us or that are inherent factors in our individual organic nature. 

Juan Navarro Baldeweg 

Following the lead given by Navarro himself in this fragment of his text "La caja de resonancia", Ignacio Moreno has investigated in depth his various plastic and architectural proposals to show not only the common origin of all of them, rooted in his formative years, but also the multiplicity of reciprocal and recurrent relationships that amalgamate them into a work of rare coherence. The pieces he refers to are the result of an extensive process of prior definition through numerous drawings, models or photographs which, on occasions, do not end with their materialisation, but transcend to other more complex spheres, as a reflection on his architecture or painting. 

"Architecture is made in two rooms", he states in the 1993 text "From Silence to Light"; one of them without physical existence in which, nevertheless, most of the work is carried out, and the other, where the projects materialise from their conditioning factors, as a result of superimposing the configurations produced in each of these two rooms. 

The work developed during his period of artistic and intellectual training, between 1960 and 1976, which coincides respectively with the start of his studies in engraving and architecture in Madrid and his return from the United States after a five-year stay at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston, directed by Moholy-Nagy's disciple Gyorgy Kepes, allows us to identify some lines of argument which relate the ideas and principles of his later architecture. The themes he uses are recurrent; they occur before his application in one discipline or another, and he returns to them time and again in search of their unattainable essence, as a continuous and unique reflection which acquires different nuances in each of the works, but which can only be understood in their totality. 

From this approach, the aim of this book is none other than to identify the origin of the themes and arguments through which Navarro Baldeweg makes the transition from one room to the other, as well as the justification of their presence, influence and evolution on his later architecture as a whole. 

Ignacio Moreno